Why 'Psycho' Is Still Scary After All These Years

Few films have ever held the lofty reputation of changing a country's daily habits. But whether it's moviegoing or the preferred choice of bathing, Psycho left an impact when it slashed across the screen.

This might not have been the first slasher (that honor likely goes to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom of the same year), but none before Psycho, and few since, have been so meticulously orchestrated in their vicious, mean-spirited, and playfully cruel dominance over the audience's emotions. Psycho is the picture that mainstreamed conceivably low-rent serial killing in the everyday world as an entertaining pastime. It also did this at a time when a gushing knife wound in the shower wept for its victim, as opposed to mocking her, making the hideous "Other" in this film's killer all the more terrifying than almost any that followed.

Infamously shrouded in secrecy during its promotion, which centered on director Alfred Hitchcock loping around the film's set to the score of one of his few comedies (The Trouble With Harry) and insisting audiences must be seated within the first ten minutes of the film's screenings, Psycho ensured that nobody who hadn't read Robert Bloch's novel would realize that Janet Leigh's protagonist, Marion Crane, wasn't the real star. The face on the marketing, and the biggest name by far on the casting bill, Leigh's Marion seduces audiences early as one of Hitch's cool blondes on the run with a bag full of money. The unsuspecting think the film is going one way, and then it decidedly goes another when Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) appears in her motel bathroom adorned in drag and a very big knife.

Paramount/Universal Initially poorly received by critics upon its release, Alfred Hitchcock summed up why Psycho worked in his trademark sardonic condescension: "It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film."

The choice of the word "aroused" is not a coincidental one. A cigar may be a cigar, but a long knife penetrating a Hollywood sex symbol in the shower is another matter entirely. Hitchcock essentially used the premise of Psycho to mingle sex and violence on the screen in a way American audiences had never known, and in doing so, he cut to a primordial terror that lesser filmmakers would later emulate in the hopes of titillation, misogyny, and true perversion.

However, the death of Leigh's Marion Crane is not only iconic because it was the first time a protagonist was slaughtered in a Hollywood picture—particularly less than halfway through the film—it was committed in a sacred place: a bathtub. Prior to Psycho, horror was the stuff of gothic castles and haunted mansions. Conversely, Psycho placed it potentially in your home and on the other side of that curtain you never see around when the water is dripping.

The pivotal scene of the bloodbath took 77 different camera set-ups and was filmed over six days. Shot mostly in extreme close-up, the vision feels subjective, disjointed, and like a sensory violation. With over 50 cuts in three minutes, the sequence forces Marion's terror to be shared by her audience. Unlike the subgenre it birthed, Marion's passing feels tragic and wasteful of a beautiful soul (and body) that was literally in the process of being cleansed. This culminates in a prolonged extreme close-up of a solitary tear in Leigh's eye. The blood in this famous black and white sequence might have been made of chocolate (a thicker residue than stage blood), but the pain was excruciatingly real. The fact that the knife was never seen penetrating the skin only made it worse.

Paramount/Universal

This entire scene was the reason Hitch made the movie. Coming off the box office disappointment that was Vertigo, the auteur had soured on working with movie stars and making their luxury vehicles. When his long-time assistant Peggy Robinson handed him Bloch's book, it was love at first sight. Paramount Pictures didn't see the movie in this lurid Ed Gein-inspired tale, but Hitch did, to the point where he financed the movie himself with the understanding that he would get a 60 percent stake in the film's negative.

Hitchcock of course got his movie, even if he had to shoot it at Universal's back lot and mostly with the TV production team of his concurrent Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was all the wiser for Hitchcock to make his first lived-in horror for which cheap black and white film stock was a bonus, and for whom a less glitzy production pedigree allowed him to shoot the movie in 50mm lenses on 35mm camera—giving the picture the closest possible approximation to unsettling human vision.

Paramount/Universal The result is a movie that digs deep into both horrifying audiences, and implicating them in murder. Beyond the twist of Anthony Perkins' boy next door turning out to be a serial killer dressed as his dead mother, Norman Bates presented the chance to fool audiences into condoning the slaughter of their lead character. To intensify the effect, many changes were made from Bloch's book. In the novel, Marion Crane (there simply named Mary) is the focus of two chapters in what is inarguably Norman's story. But on screen, Norman, who opens the novel, doesn't appear until the 28-minute mark when Marion meets him. And instead of being the overweight, old, and heavy drinker that readers knew, Norman is sweet, considerate, and the perhaps just a little too shy as the gangly Anthony Perkins.

So, when he has to clean up "mother's mess" in the shower, it is there that audiences begin rooting for a serial killer, even if they don't realize yet what details filled out Mama Bates' silhouette in the earlier murder.

The movie continues on until its ultimate and terrifying reveal, but this is a film about gashing the audience's sense of safety away from where they feel the most vulnerable. Whether it's 1960 or 2014, the shower has never seemed any less menacing than when Norman ripped apart that curtain. The piercing score in these scenes of screeching violin strings was at Bernard Hermann's insistence. Hitchcock wanted a jazz score overall and no music in the murder or motel sequences—after hearing Hermann's treatment, the director whose ego was as ponderous as his reputation gave the composer penultimate credit during the opening titles, second only to Hitchcock's own.

It was the perfect collaboration in ruining shower time for every generation since.